Galsworthy. Even the most innocent tricks
of emphasis are to him snares of the Evil One. He would sooner die than
drop his curtain on a particularly effective line. It is his chief
ambition that you should never discern any arrangement, any intention,
in his work. As a rule, the only reason you can see for his doing thus
or thus is his desire that you should see no reason for it. He does not
carry this tendency, as some do, to the point of eccentricity; but he
certainly goes as far as any one should be advised to follow. A little
further, and you incur the danger of becoming affectedly unaffected,
artificially inartificial.
I am far from pleading for the conventional tableau at the end of each
act, with all the characters petrified, as it were, in
penny-plain-twopence-coloured attitudes. But it is certainly desirable
that the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by
surprise, and even that the spectator should feel the moment to be
rightly chosen, though he might be unable to give any reason for his
feeling.
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